Best Song: “Someone Like You” by Adele

This was one of the “soundtrack” songs I played on repeat while I wrote Exactly Where They’d Fall this year, so maybe I have a more emotional reason for considering it my favorite. If anyone was ever curious to know how my book feels in song form – it feels like that. Ouch, huh?

Gorgeous song though. I couldn’t get enough of it, even as much as they splashed it all over the radio.

Best New Toy: my Canon Rebel t3i

Best Date: we didn’t have enough of them, but dinner along the Occoquan River on Not-Rapture day – do you remember Not-Rapture Day, lol! May 21st, 2011 – the air was abuzz with hilarity and we were child-free for four hours. 6:00pm rolled around and nobody dissipated into thin air. We wondered briefly if maybe we just didn’t make the list… but then it seemed nobody made the list.

Best TV Show: this was the year I fell in love with Shameless (UK version). It’s not new to most people, but it was new to me.

Best thing that would have been totally awesome had it actually panned out: I started to do an online boating course as novel research, with the plans to buy an actual boat this spring. After finding the info I needed for the book, I never did finish the course. I will though. Because I totally want a boat!

And yes, we’ll then own a boat before we own a house. But that’s okay. Maybe we’ll just live on the boat and float around the world and never have to pick a place to stay?

Best Movie: Biutiful. This is a 2010 film we rented on Netflix. OMG, bawl my eyes out!

Best Place We Visited: This was a close call. I went to some pretty amazing places for the first time this year – Bath, in England. Seeing the clouds sink down into the Shenandoah Valley! Truly spectacular places to see. But after all the hype I’ve been hearing from friends over the years, we finally made a trip up to Traverse City, MI.

Fell in love, people!

Nevermind the fact that it’s hours away from almost everything (or well, maybe that’s *why* it’s such a treasure?) The charming town, the oil and vinegar shop, the popcorn, the little-bitty-almost mountains, the forests, the breakfast shop with the awesome omelets and the good coffee creamers, the farmer’s markets, the earthy people – there’s a lady with a coffee shop who gave a cookie with every cup of coffee, and she gave Dylan a toy with his orange juice! OMG.

And the water! The warm sand, and hot sun, and that icy, icy cold, royal blue water.

Love. That is all. <3

(I also kept thinking, it’s because we’re in tourist season, isn’t it? Maybe they all turn into frozen vampires once September rolls around. I’d like to believe not though.)

Best Book: Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close

Best New Addiction: Tumblr. Tumblr is so fun! I started up about three of them in seven seconds, lol! Combine Tumblr and Sims and you get a Simblr = OMG indestructible. Many a great moment have been lost to Simblrs!

Best Hippie Idea: Coloring hair with henna. I’ve been meaning to try it for a long time, but only got around to it this year. It’s fun to read about how to mix different colors for dyes.

Best New Pipe-Dream: indie authordom, for sure!

(Narrowly beating out my whimsical 5-year plan to buy a house in Traverse City?)

Best Accomplishment: finishing a whole novel! Beginning, middle, end, finished! Not 40% of a book. Not 85% of a first draft, with notes for an ending. A whole book.

I can finish things, people! I can!

And then I finished two more drafts of revisions on it too!

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a super awesome 2012!

This is one of those fluffy posts, because I failed to have anything more significant to say. You can be assured I’m just pouring all of my brain-power into my fiction. Because if this post were edible, it would be cotton-candy.

Modern songs that remind me of the 90′s:

Silversun Pickups, “Lazy Eye”

They remind me of old-school Smashing Pumpkins! I’m hearing a bit of “Cherub Rock” from Siamese Dream. How about you guys?

MGMT, “Kids”

I don’t know why this one reminds me of the 90′s, but it does, lol! Maybe the animation reminds me of “Paranoid Android“, in that way it’s deceptively childish while actually being nightmarishly disturbing.

Foster the People, “Pumped Up Kicks”

I first wanted to say the sound reminded me of mid-90′s Beck, but then when I actually went back to listen to some Beck it was a little off. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else? The dude’s voice is something else entirely, and I can’t think of who he reminds me of. Totally 90′s though.

Happy listening!

I made it outside a couple weeks ago just in time to snap a few fall pictures before the colors were gone for good. Now it’s December, and freezing outside, and we’ve put up our Christmas tree.

Wow, how did that happen?

A rhetorical question, of course, because I know how it happened – I’ve been working! I’ve been in my writing cave, revising up my third draft, and sending it happily on to my editor and another beta reader.

Oh, have I mentioned that I’ve hired a real and actual editor? Because I did! And I’m going to be setting up accounts with printers in these coming weeks. (I’m planning to use Lightning Source, for those curious.) And I’ve started an expense folder for my tax deductions. (I think I might need an actual accountant this year, rather than TurboTax.com, lol!) This is turning into a real operation here, folks!

I’ve also started work on my book cover. There’s a peek of the working draft of it – front and back – over on my FB author page. I’ve also made Exactly Where They’d Fall its own book page, and you can see a smaller peek of it there too. The final, official book cover image will not be very different from this – just some minor tweaks I want to make. But I’ll post it here, and make a very loud and official fuss over it when it’s finished!

I’m also planning a small refresh for this website – OMG, why didn’t anyone tell me how pink it was!?!

(No, I don’t mind the pink, sometimes, but I’m bored of it now.)

Also, every fall, somehow we always manage to get sick for the whole span of mid-September through mid-November. All those little kids and back-to-school germs, and before we know it, it’s December. It’s sort of shocking how short a time the fall colors last – just a couple weeks. We managed to sneak outside for a minute, in between colds and revisions, and see all the colors before they were over. Before they all turned brown and fell, to decompose and become worm food.

(click through for more fall pics, 6 in total)

So that’s what I’ve been doing. What have you guys been up to?